Digital video compression systems or broadcast television systems, such as digital video broadcast systems, comprise a number of interconnected devices. The interconnected devices form a network that provides a solution to meet the requirements of a customer, thereby defining a system. The devices forming the network may be provided by a number of different vendors.
The purpose of any of these systems is to transform and re-purpose signals from various sources to various destinations. In doing so, a number of transformations are applied to those signals, for example encoding, transcoding, ad-insertion, multiplexing, de-scrambling, scrambling, joining or splitting of data streams, and so on. The transformations are provided by software applications and separate hardware resources, such as different device chassis or option cards within a chassis.
In older generation systems, one hardware device would typically provide a limited part of the solution and one type of transform function, for example encoding only, but in newer systems a hardware device may typically comprise a number of transform functions within the same hardware resource, for example encoding, transcoding or descrambling all within the same hardware.
An overall system (comprising a number of separate devices) is managed by a control system. The control system collects information from the various devices and provides views to manage the status and configuration of the devices as a system. The user interface of such a control system is typically provided by a native user interface installed as part of the control system.
As the network of interconnected devices may be quite varied, some of the user interfaces are provided by non-native applications such as device web pages. As such, a user is provided with a mixture of different interface views.
The user interfaces need to provide the ability to allow the user to manage interconnections in the system, such as Internet protocol (IP) interconnections, DVB interconnections, encoding functions, multiplexing functions, and all manner of different parameters.
In some networks, the system can be managed entirely by the control system. Whist the user experience is improved in such a scenario because the user has access to a single user interface, the manner in which the system is configured is typically equipment centric or transport stream centric.
For equipment centric configuration and monitoring in non-native control systems, a user manages each device independently using the device's own user interface (such a web interface being provided for each device). The user normally visualizes a map of hardware in the system and their physical connections, and manages each device in-turn by using an interface which is specific to each device. This is an equipment based paradigm.
For a transport stream centric approach, the configuration is abstracted to the input and or output of the system. This is typically viewed using one or more tree based views since a transport stream has a logical hierarchy structure. This is a transport stream paradigm.
Where the control system provides a graphical ‘map’ of the devices in the system, illustrating each device and its connection to the next device(s), this hardware view can also be used for monitoring purposes.
As a result of the varied user interfaces provided by the system, the user interactions (user experience) is disjointed. That is, the user must view a number of different user interfaces, configure each device in turn or partly configure the system using the native control user interface provided by the control system.
Where the control system provides an equipment centric approach, the user experience remains disjointed. Data may need to be entered into different device user interfaces, thus having the disadvantage of requiring duplicate data entry, and each equipment type has a different approach or abstraction with managing its part of the overall system configuration.
Where the approach is transport stream centric, the configuration and monitoring still does not provide a way of managing (configuring or monitoring) the system across all the transform functions in a single view—a number of views may need to be launched to achieve a task. Furthermore, a user is typically forced to hunt into various property pages and tabs to locate properties to achieve some specific task.
FIG. 1 is an example of the equipment centric approach, whereby lists of network devices (for example input nodes 101, switches/routers 103, encoders/transcoders 105, multiplexers 107, output nodes 109) and their physical connection are illustrated. These views are offered on the user interface in the form of a map of the hardware in the system, as shown in FIG. 1, but this has the disadvantage of being limited to physical devices and their interconnections.